(originally published at www.boydneil.com)
I was asked today to talk about any ‘new’ social web assets that the organization I was meeting with should consider. It’s a common question from clients and colleagues alike. Partly it’s a function of curiosity and partly I think a belief there is a social web object somewhere that will be the silver bullet for every enterprise social web challenge. Of course, that’s not likely. The cheap or free platforms here aren’t a panacea for anything; but they’re worth taking a look at.
Identi.ca
Unlike Twitter, identi.ca is open source micro-blogging service with the goal of providing “fair and transparent” service that preserves users’ autonomy. The data is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

The goal here is autonomy — you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don’t like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).

Chatter.com
From the folks at salesforce.com, Chatter.com allows you to create a private and secure social network for your company. The consultancy I work for uses Yammer.com. I can’t see much difference between the two. Maybe someone from either company will post a comment explaining the dissimilarities.
Pulse CMS Pro
This one could be really useful for small companies. It is a WYSIWYG editor that lets you edit any part of an existing website in, so it claims, five minutes. The basic model is free, and the pro version about $20.
Summify
From two Romanian “hackers and entrepreneurs” (@mirceapasoi and @cgst)comes Summify which “distills your social feeds, boiling it down into a summary of the top five or ten most important and relevant stories.”
Play around with them and see if they are worth dropping into your quiver of web tools.

Authored by: Boyd Neil